


Recurrence

by angleton



Category: Zootopia (2016), ビースターズ | BEASTARS
Genre: Crossover, Flash Fic, Gen, Not about characters, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:42:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23973220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angleton/pseuds/angleton
Summary: A flash fiction that establishes a timeline that unites the universes of Beastars, Shock-Collar Zootopia Concept and Zootopia Proper; taking considerable liberties with all three. Deals with worldbuilding and doesn't focus on particular characters or scenes.
Kudos: 13





	Recurrence

  1. Fed up with the murders, the Market, the feelings of defencelessness, the herbivores start an escalating series of riots. Retaliations ensue. Law enforcement is appearing more and more impotent. A number of organisations pop up, and whatever flavour they have: a gang, a paramilitary group, a neighbourhood watch, a conspiracy among military officers — they all declare their reason for existence is To Protect Our Own. As antagonism intensifies, these disparate groups fold into one of the two coalitions. Within both sides, radicals rapidly gain control, purging more moderate members as necessary.  
To the horror of the majority of the population, a full-blown civil war erupts. If you don't volunteer to take arms to kill your friends or, for the most unfortunate, to kill your family, you are conscripted at gunpoint. Not everybody finds themself a combatant, but even for those who don't, life will never be the same, if they manage to survive at all. Fraternising with the enemy considerably reduces the chances of that.
  2. The herbivores win. The society has become industrial, and bite strength or sharpness of claws matter much less than they used to. As the saying goes, evolution made beasts, but Samuel Colt made them equal. When predator shock troops reach a prey defensive line, that line crumbles. Forty-nine times out of fifty those troops don't manage to close the distance. (There are not many herbivore snipers, because primal instincts are not aware of what optical magnification is. That shortage is not significant in the end.) Very few possessed the foresight to predict how semiautomatics and machine guns would tip the balance of power. Those visionaries on the carnivorous side were uniformly ridiculed. The war is lost before the complacent leaders have a chance to adapt.
  3. Woe to the vanquished. Draconian measures are forced upon every carnivore: disenfranchisement, ban from many occupations, relocation to ghettos, and most important of all, mandatory collars that administer progressively stronger electric shocks the more agitated a carnivore gets. There is a fig leaf of “public safety” justification, but mostly this is pure revanchism. There is a small number of herbivores who are appalled at the new world, but the rest experience a combination of schadenfreude and relief that this way the incredibly bloody conflict is stopped until the end of the time.
  4. Several generations pass. Two-pronged artificial selection is thrust upon the carnivores. The reproduction of the fittest means that, first, they were not proud enough to fight to the bitter end in the war, and, second, they possessed enough self control to survive under the new regime.  
In a very short time frame, an average carnivore becomes much more “tame” — especially as encountered by an average herbivore. Predator attacks almost come across as an urban legend. (Emotionless sociopathic killers for hire are not deterred by the collars. But this particular demographic is small enough that even roommate disputes contribute a larger portion to the homicide statistics.)
  5. During these decades, independently of anything of the above, it is discovered that the extremely widespread invasive plant Midnicampum Holicithias has pollen that, when accumulated in an organism in sufficient quantities, causes increased aggression and critically lowered impulse control. Successful campaigns to eliminate wild-growing plants are carried out, and the levels of violent crime indeed fall.  
(There is a clandestine government program, a cross between bioweapon research and MKULTRA, to mass produce purified and concentrated active component of the plant, but cooler heads quickly declare the program too Mad Science and shut it down. Several officials suddenly announce their decision to retire early. Somewhere in the records there is a meeting minutes document which contains a sentence “Is there one single person here who is not out of his fucking mind?” Amusingly, when the document is eventually declassified and released to the public, it is the only line that escapes being redacted, and the image becomes a minor meme).
  6. With the “domestication” of the assorted carnivorous species and the overall decrease in violence, various movements for carnivorous emancipation take root, and surprisingly swiftly achieve their objectives. A large part of their success is the support of the younger age groups of prey species, who never experienced the war or the pre-war atmosphere of powerlessness, and who started to forge new connections with their carnivore compatriots from a blank slate. Shock collars are abolished and condemned as torture devices that they are, and restoration of other rights follows shortly thereafter.
  7. The integration of two formerly segregated populations doesn't happen overnight. But the government acts with a truly remarkable combination of good intentions, efficiency and harshness. Mixed boarding schools are reintroduced, and over loud protests of parents, almost every school is converted into this type, including formerly day schools. The worst of the slums are bulldozed, the occupants are moved into government-owned condominiums, which can be privatised at severely below-market rates after a number of continuous years of tenancy. Technological progress allows incredibly ambitious projects to be undertaken, such as small-scale geo-engineering to separate the city into different climatic zones. These projects provide an abundance of well-paying, well-respected jobs. The contractors are heavily incentivised to fill positions by promoting those who started at the lower rungs. The government commissions multiple writers, movie directors, singers and other artists for works with a deliberate message, and then manages to only minimally meddle in the creative process. It still produces a lot of transparent propaganda, but also some exceptional works of art. The judiciary is unofficially advised to throw the book at perpetrators of both herbivore-on-carnivore and carnivore-on-herbivore crimes.
  8. History is thoroughly rewritten for the greater good of harmony and unity. Narratives are changed, focuses are shifted, certain events quietly go unmentioned. Textbook publishers and paper recycling companies work overtime. New traditions and rituals are introduced, sometimes brand new, sometimes subverting the previously existing ones. Obviously, it will take time, but it is inevitable that one day the fact that The Solidarity Day holiday used to be called The Herbivore Triumph Day will disappear from the living memory. The city's motto becomes “Where anyone can be anything”.
  9. Of course, sapients being what sapients are, tribalism quickly reasserts itself again, now mostly as stereotyping individual species traits. But for the moment, the tensions are infinitesimal compared to the past. Politics deteriorate from constantly looming existential anxieties into squabbles about import tariffs, zoning laws, job certifications; into pandering to the electorate. It is due to the latter that some years down the line a lion mayoral candidate selects a sheep as his running mate.
  10. However mistreated and reduced to a glorified secretary the newly elected Assistant Mayor is, she still merits top secret clearance (she will later find it dramatically appropriate, given that originally “secretary” meant “a person entrusted with secrets”). During one of the interminable assignments in the archives, she stumbles upon some extremely intriguing classified research. The research is unfinished, but it wouldn't take significant resources to replicate its crudest results. And she has ample connections to make that happen; after all, she had been chosen for her position because of the connections to her community. A plan begins to take shape.
  11. Those who are unaware of the past become doomed to repeat it.



**Author's Note:**

> The explanation of different behaviour of Beastars-era predators and Zootopia-era predators that is based on ambient Nighthowler pollen is inspired by the real-world [theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-crime_hypothesis) that adoption of unleaded gasoline caused decrease in crime rates. In particular, by the fact that among the toxic effects of lead is reduced impulse control.


End file.
